Using Data to Drive Sales and Marketing Tactics

As a marketing or sales leader, have you ever found yourself sitting in a presentation with beautiful, data-rich dashboards that will help you do leadership things such as review the “state of the union,” analyze your progress, make more informed decisions, or predict the future? SWC uses a number of tools such as Qlik, Tableau and Microsoft’s recently refreshed cloud-based Power BI solution to create these beautiful works of art through data dashboards that drive the decision-making process.

The challenge we most often see marketing and sales leaders struggle with is where to begin your journey. In our last luncheon, our BI and CRM groups combined forces to talk about the rich and powerful dashboards you can build to help drive your marketing and sales tactics. We used the analogy that the “the pyramids weren’t built in a day.” Each pyramid started with one block. In our world, those blocks are your marketing and sales data.

Build Your CRM Foundation

Companies need a place for their marketing and sales teams to put their campaign, lead, customer, opportunity, and activity data. Most marketing and sales data sits in a CRM system. We use our CRM Maturity Model to help our customers understand where they are in this model. The CRM Maturity Model also helps our customers figure out what the next step is—usually a pragmatic low cost step.

Building the foundation is about getting your data into a system where it can be cleansed and organized so that it can be reported on later. Depending on your level of adoption, you can use our CRM Maturity Model to determine how the data can be further organized and where contextual data can be added to your customer data. Contextual data helps tell a story as it creates relationships between the content and data in your CRM system. This enables you to build more meaningful reports and dashboards.

Moving Up in the CRM Maturity Model

Sales teams typically at the “Captured” maturity level put their leads, opportunities, activities, and account information into a CRM system. This allows sales managers to use CRM reporting tools to learn more about what their sales professionals are doing. This is basic reporting. It’s a great first step. Now let’s put contextual data around the information.

Sales teams typically at the “Managed” maturity level implement their sales process in CRM as workflows. These workflows place rules around what data is entered. A great example would be your company’s sales stages. This is really the definition of your sales funnel. The CRM workflow requires certain fields of data to be entered before moving on to the next stage in your sales process. Now you have data that describes where you are. Some examples include sales phase, industry, company size, lead source, and email campaign. Reporting on your data becomes more meaningful as the sales manager can now see relationships. These relationships provide information that leads to better decision making. Rich and powerful reports and dashboards can be created at this point.

We’ll Help Establish Your Data Foundation

As you progress through the Maturity Model, you’ll start to create visually rich dashboards that drive sales and marketing tactics. But to get there, you need to start with a solid foundation. SWC has the experience and proven methodology to help you demonstrate inexpensive and incremental wins wherever you are in the CRM Maturity Model. Want to start realizing the value of your data? contact SWC today or join us for our next event on using data to drive marketing and sales tactics.